You know a term is a dirty word when its proponents want it put out to pasture.
Jonah Goldberg is a neo-con. By no means, is he conservative. Neo-cons were behind the disastrous Afghan and Iraq invasions of 2002 and 2003 respectively.
During the 1980s, “liberal” became a dirty word, so Americans left of center embraced the term “progressive” instead.
During the 1970s and 1980s, neo-cons took over the conservative movement, moving it left. Neo-cons now dominate the Republican party.
As Burt Blumert put it: “Neocons, as ex-Trotskyites, are bad enough, but those who follow the pro-pagan Leo Strauss are deadly. He advocated the Big Lie. Forgive me for all the gory details, but these people – with their other leaders like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and the help of the CIA – perverted the American right into loving the welfare-warfare state.”
What does it mean to be conservative? To be against equality. Conservatives are against equality and against nation building. Neo-cons are for equality and for imposing democracy and western values at the point of a gun.
Most Jews are not neo-conservatives. Neo-cons account for a tiny proportion of Jews but they are immensely influential due to their money, brains, energy and cohesion. It is much easier to get a job as a public intellectual if you are a neo-con than if you are a conservative like Paul Gottfriend.
Gottfriend is particularly biting about Jonah Goldberg and other Fox News neo-cons.
In interviews and on the stump, Sen. Ted Cruz likes to attack President Obama, Hillary Clinton and “some of the more aggressive Washington neocons” for their support of regime change in the Middle East.
Every time we topple a dictator, Cruz argues, we end up helping terrorists or extremists.
He has a point. But what interests me is his use of the word neocon. What does he really mean?
Some see dark intentions. “He knows that the term in the usual far-left and far-right parlance means warmonger, if not warmongering Jewish advisers, so it is not something he should’ve done,” former Bush advisor Elliott Abrams told National Review. Another former Bush advisor calls the term “a dog whistle.”
I think that’s all a bit overblown. Cruz is just trying to criticize his opponent Marco Rubio, who supported regime change in Libya.
But Abrams is right – and Cruz surely knows – that “neocon” has become code for suspiciously Hebraic super-hawk. That’s absurd and absurdly reductive. So maybe it’s time we retired the term, which is now a catchall for “things I don’t like.”
At first, neocons weren’t particularly associated with foreign policy. They were intellectuals disillusioned by the folly of the Great Society. As Irving Kristol famously put it, a “neoconservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality.” The Public Interest, the first neoconservative publication, co-edited by Kristol, was a wonkish domestic policy journal.
Kristol later argued that neoconservatism was not an ideology but a “persuasion.” William F. Buckley, the avatar of supposedly authentic traditional conservatism, agreed. The neocons, he explained, brought the new language of sociology to an intellectual tradition that had been grounded more in Aristotelian thinking.
The neocon belief in democracy promotion grew out of disgust with Richard Nixon’s détente and Jimmy Carter’s fecklessness, but hardly amounted to knee-jerk interventionism. When Jeane Kirkpatrick articulated a theory of neoconservative foreign policy in Commentary magazine in 1979, she cautioned that it was unwise to demand rapid libertalization in autocratic countries, and that gradual change was a more realistic goal than immediate transformation.
